Possible alteration to Cleric Stance

[Ghishlain]

It's not a good way to do that. In fact, it's one of the absolutely worst ways to do it.

If the dev team thinks healer DPS is a problem (which, as far as I'm aware, they don't, they just don't want healer DPS to be required to clear content, as it was in the second half of Gordias Savage during early progression), then this should be fixed with encounter design, and not by punishing healers who want to do something when there's no one to heal with heavy RNG.

Give us fights where it's actually required to be healing nearly 100% of the time. Make it extremely risky to hop into Cleric Stance because someone might die in the two GCDs until you can deactivate it again. Or give us something meaningful to do other than DPSing while we don't have to heal (AST's cards are probably the closest thing we currently have in this regard). Hell, even straight out nerfing healer damage would be a better way to go about reducing healer DPS. The current situation is complete bullshit.

I never said the Dev team thought healer DPS was a problem. What I said is I feel the Dev team is trying to limit healer DPS in specific ways (in this case - accuracy) to make it more difficult for healer's to DPS as a control mechanism to help keep DPS in line with how they perceive it should be for the current content tier. It's arbitrary but it serves the purpose they seem to have (my own opinion, I don't speak to know how the Devs operate).

If the dev team had any problem with healer DPS, they would out right remove Cleric Stance in any 4- or 8- player content like they removed it from PvP. But they haven't yet, so that clearly indicates that they enjoy how the healer meta is currently working (or they don't have a viable solution yet if they dislike how its become). Again, also my opinion based on my own observations.

Unfortunately, because of way Cleric Stance work you can't possible have an encounter so healing intensive that you're forced to heal every GCD. If you do that you're effectively going to run the healer out of MP in like 6-7 minutes without support like Mage's Ballad and thus making encounters exceedingly short at that point compared to the current 10-13 minute encounters we have (whether this is good or bad is up to the Dev team to decide). You can encourage more risk / reward of Cleric Stance by having a longer cooldown period when you toggle Cleric Stance (say in the realm of 10-15s) so there are less opportunities to Cleric Stance and keeping healing required every 3-4 GCDs or so but then that'll mean the healer is sitting there for 2-3 GCDs waiting for something to happen. Likewise, nerfing potencies of Healer DPS spells would mean healer's having difficulty clearing solo MSQ content and also not a very good solution.

It's an interesting trap the Dev team put themselves in when they made Cleric Stance. I've played quite a few MMOs in my past and FFXIV is the first MMO where a healer has the ability to have their main attack stat comparable to magical DPS and have similar restrictions and freedoms their magic wielding counterparts have too. It makes for interesting play as a healer while also making it a very difficult thing to balance from a development perspective. If you make Healer DPS too powerful, normal DPS will start to complain at the ease healer's get. It also allows for specific groups to clear content earlier than intended because of the amount of DPS a healer can provide over the course of a fight. If both healer's combined contribute 6-8% DPS total that's 6-8% DPS less the raid has to do to clear content. Since content isn't designed with healer DPS in mind, it almost feels like the dev team has to provide something arbitrary to try to keep healer DPS in check so content is cleared exceedingly fast which is a fine line to tread.

Whether we like it or not, Accuracy is here to stay until at least 4.0. In my mind, it feels like it's the check and balance to healer DPS that the Dev team can tweak to suit their liking. This can lead to issues down the line that are hopefully addressed as future content is released leading up to 4.0. Until then, I will gladly work around this limitation to the best of my ability and see where the future development holds.